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The Mechanics Behind Live Search's Review Summaries

Microsoft's Live Search now has a section called "Most Popular Products" that aggregates and summarizes user reviews of computer and electronics products within the search results. Thumbnails of the products appear within the SERPs with a star rating, and when users click on the picture, they're taken to the product's review pages.

MSN compiles these reviews from a number of third-party Web sites and in addition to the actual written statements, gives users a graphical depiction of how the product was rated for specific features, called "User reviews at a glance."

A search for "Vaio laptop" for example, returns pictures of four reviewed products nestled between the sponsored and organic search results. Clicking on a thumbnail or the link below it brings the user to the product review page, where Live Search uses green bars of varying lengths to rate the features that were most discussed like "screen," "memory," and "battery life."

Live Search also summarizes these reviews so that users don't have to read through too many to determine that a product is "easy to use," "a good value for the price," or "not sturdy enough," but the team also realizes that the summarization process isn't infallible. They write, "the summarization isn't always perfect and occasionally misclassifies comments so we're working hard to continually improve the accuracy of this technology."

Read the whole story at Live Search »

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